bapoumba's blog

Scenari – A powerful application to create and publish documents

Overview

This application is most probably going to be of interest to people working in the education field, as I am, but not only.

I discovered scenari when one of the developers came for a 3 days workshop at my university.
I create resources and teach online and have been so far doing very poorly regarding online multimedia documents. Mainly out of ignorance and poor taste for multimedia techy stuff, I have given .pdf online and that was about it..

scenari is making it easy, understand take care of most of the tech stuff and I can concentrate on the course content, the outline, the exercises or tests I wish student to perform etc. On the teaching method and pedagogy, basically.

I’ve been testing and using only a small portion of what scenari has to offer. Additionally, scenari can help you write resume, reports, create a web site or web radio, a slide show or training modules.

So, why a special post about this application ?

Ubuntu Lucid install procedure

scenari comes under different licences, including gpl, and is supported on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Their linux install page is not translated in English, yet, (in French here) so here is what I’ve done to get it to run on Ubuntu Lucid:

Add their repository to the /etc/apt/sources.list, by either editing the file itself or adding the repo in synaptic for example.

deb http://scenari-platform.org/deb lucid main

Note: to use the latest and most bleeding edge version (currently scenarichain3.7), add nightly ad the end of the line for it to look like

deb http://scenari-platform.org/deb lucid main nightly

Reload the sources.list, install scenarichain3.7

Once scenarichain is installed, you first need to install a model (a wsppack). You can find some here : http://scenari-platform.org/projects/opale/files/latestTesting/wsppack/. I installed opalesup which is better suited for university work. You can tweak and make your own wsppack, provided you know css and other things, which I do not. Some knowledgeable people at my univ do and will skin scenari to match our visual identity.

scenarichain is a whole suite of applications, opalesup being one of them. The models can be edited and adapted to your own web environment or corporate styling. Opalesup is also distributed as a standalone application, working out of the box without the need to install scenarichain or scenaribuilder. Searching for “scenari” with any package manager will allow you to browse all the applications the suite offers.

Export

One of scenari very interesting features is the export of your work into a variety of formats, including web to browse the class in a web browser with all the interactions working (quiz etc.), SCORM (compatible with moodle. Other LMS are also supported), paper (.odp) and slide presentation (still experimental).

The extremely positive point is scenari is a TIME SAVER. The work is done in one place, and then a click away from all sorts of presentations.

Create a two hours class, including extra exercises if you wish, package it for moodle and make it a SCORM activity on the online univ teaching site, hand out a simplified paper version to the students once you get into the room, teach with a video presentation.